Building Evaluation Capacity Through Collective Impact Initiatives

Extesion responds to multidimensional community needs through innovative programmatic and outreach efforts that often require collaborations across disciplinary boundaries. Recently, the collective impact model has emerged as a promising collaborative framework for evaluating the broader outcomes of Extension’s cohesive and cross-disciplinary programmatic response to complex community issues. However, little is known about how collective impact initiatives contribute to evaluation capacity building. Drawing on lessons learned from two collective impact initiatives established to evaluate the effectiveness of an Extension organization’s statewide programs targeting substance use recovery and workforce development, this presentation provides an illustrative example of how collective impact initiatives enhance individual and organizational evaluation capacity. The presentation will provide a comprehensive description of the steps involved in the collective impact process, evaluation capacity building activities and core competencies within each step, and initial data on the contributions of the initiatives to evaluation capacity building at the individual and organizational levels.